Glitterturders Keep Asking What Sims 4 Expansion Pack They Should Waste Their Money On.

So unfortunately even though I have a warning disclaimer stating that I don’t play Sims 4, I still get Sims 4 questions which proves in no uncertain terms that Sims 4 players do not read  

CAVEAT EMPTOR: I do not own any Sims 4 EPs. SO your mileage may vary.

The latest EP DISCOVER UNIVERSITY unlike many of the other Sims 4 EPs appears to be more fully fleshed out in a way that mirrors previous iterations like Sims 2 University and Sims 3 University Life.

For a game that has been excruciatingly and superficially banal; previous game content that ranged from the superfluous to being led by a cattle nose-ring “do task a) then proceed to task b)”. Discover University is refreshingly chock full of things to do, sims to meet and woohoo (when you’re not studying or when; well what’s for me to say, you only live once), parties to go to and get mind-numbingly blitzed on juice. Way more things than I can remember or care to since I try to mind-bleach Sims 4 content out of my mind as soon as it is humanly possible.

Hopefully this LGR’esqe rant (He and I pretty much have the same outlook in terms of sarcasm except that he can exhibit it on a much regular interval and eloquent manner than I can) has helped you to decide whether or not to blow whatever money you could conceivably be saving for other uses on this faint spark of hope for the Sims 4 game.

Well Speculation About Sims 5 is on the Rise

With simmers digging up Sims speculation on whether EA is going to go full on into a new Sims game; presumably the Sims 5, it is sincerely hoped that the bitter backlash from those fans who disliked the idea of the Sims being dumbed down to the point of idiocy has registered on the EA development team.

There was a reason why Sims 3 outsold the rest of the Sims franchise. It was unique and the open world took the franchise in a completely new and innovative direction.

Something Sims 4 failed miserably to do. In fact it stripped the game so badly that it was barely a mere shell of what it was supposed to be and nowhere near the quality of the game it was supposed to replace let alone follow in the footsteps of Sims 1 let alone the lofty heights of Sims 2.

The Sims 4 tried futilely to capture the quirky humor of the Sims 2 but achieved only gesticulations that appeared much like a disjointed spastic having an epileptic seizure. Instead of being amused and entertained by this it was all that I could do to not picture it as a car-wreck; my reaction to the whole thing being about the same level of disgusted reaction as a nun watching the 2004 movie by Paul Haggis, the ice cream scene on slow motion.

With visceral reactions like that to the Sims 4’s dumbed-down content, is it any wonder that only those who are well accustomed to not caring about value for money are the only ones who buy this sorry excuse for a game. It is nothing more than a mobile game mass-marketed to teenagers. And the sorry situation that EA finds itself in is the lack of effort on putting anything substantial into a proper assessment of why the Sims 3 sold so well despite the frustrating problems encountered with incessant Error 12 crashes.

The Sims 3, despite its more vocal detractors, was not a bad game. The Sims 3 broke convention with life-sims and went realistic graphics in its environment. At least as realistic as it could get with 2009 graphics technology. The whole point was that Sims 3 team was not reluctant to push the edge and to see how far they could go. In that regard they were fearless. And Simmers were wondering just how far the next iteration of the Sims was going to push the envelope.

What happened was the new development team listened to all those who were complaining about Sims 3 and decided to dumb down the game by turning to cartoon graphics and painted backgrounds that weren’t even accessible outside of a very small defined rectangular sections of town everything else was a painted background; essentially any scene that seemed the slightest bit interesting would be a no-go zone which is highly irritating to someone who is accustomed to going anywhere as long as the Sims 3 map allowed. No restrictions.

But restrictions and a much reduced map were what we got along with excuses like “we’re trying to make the game run better and make sure that lower end systems are able to run it and the ones who complained about the fact that the game was being sliced to pieces for DLC were summarily silenced by the Glitterturd Guild; were promptly told to stop taking the development team to task for taking the easy way out; holding the team accountable for their actions and making sure that they put out their very best effort. The result is what you see in the lack of re-playability and the consistently boring Expansion, Stuff and Game Packs that litter the Sims 4 spartan landscape.

To put it bluntly; Sims 4 is s veritable shit-show with perhaps the exception of the Discover University expansion pack which of course broke the game yet again which had to be fixed by yet another game update. Wow, isn’t that just great; it should be a marketing tool.

”Buy an Expansion, Stuff or Game Pack; get a new bug free. Experience the added frustration of ”For the three hundred and sixty eighth time.,,why doesn’t my fucking game work?!!!!”

Well, Jonny, you’re just having a bad day, go outside and play ball. It’ll get fixed in two weeks when the new bug-fix patch is rolled out. You have a wonderful day now.

Yes, Folks, Jonny is going to have to wait until EA troubleshooting gets around to getting his game working again. But in that time Jonny is learning a wonderful life lesson; You always have to have patience when you deal with computer problems. Find a proactive solution by not complaining because EA wants you to play your game even when you can’t play your game because...they messed uo!

...or you, Glitterturders just could have backed us up and told the development team to smarten the fuck up and work out the damned bugs before it hit store shelves.

Mina

...eyeballing me for paying more attention to Sims than to her.

..human...you...have failed me

For my fan-fiction writing that I have to be detailed in with regards to flying scenes I do a lot of research and that tends to bleed over into any Sims game that has anything to do with military and JAG. This involves a lot of reading gleaning details to the point where the ordinary lay-person would think you actually have some background in military aviation. That’s what separates a good writer from one who you instantly know doesn’t put in the time to research their material.

Accuracy is crucial when you’re writing for any fandom. If you’re not accurate in detail, fans will know and they won’t be able to immerse themselves in the story.

Write for enjoyment; write to challenge yourself but know that when you take the final step in developing your own characters, your own settings; worlds and plot lines, know that you’ll be held to a high level of detail and the research that builds the foundation for it.

It Appears that Criticism About the Glitterturd is being Silenced

Evidently it’s true that EA wants an echo chamber with their latest shimmering pile of vomitous shit that they purport to be a better Sims game than Sims 3.

If the SimGurus didn’t realize that the discussion was kept in the Sims 3 side of the forums in order to keep it from becoming a verbal battle between TS3 and TS4; then they evidently need a new prescription for their eyewear. What turned it into a nasty spitball fight was a pair of TS4 sycophants coming over and trying to instigate an argument as to why they feel that their lacking game is so much better in a successful bid to get this thread shut down.

Justifiable criticism is the obligation to speak out in the face of gross or continuous faulty treatment.

Case in point: we expected a game that exceeded the previous game in quality. We also wanted to see a game that pushed the boundaries of what programming could accomplish: break new ground.

What they gave us was a game that went backwards, stripping the game of what it used to be in the two previous iterations. Not only that they appealed to the money-grubbing execs who evidently gave orders to strip the game of any potential monetize-able assets in order to sell them back to us at a cost. In fact the outrage from the fans got so loud they had to put them back in at no cost to the fans though the glitter-turders didn’t get their toddlers, until far later, which should have been a base game included life stage in the first place.

They’ve tried to shove stuff-packs up our asses in an attempt to say “oh look see how much more content that we’re giving you though when you compare TS3’s EA store items and the glitterycrap’s stuff and game packs; the sparkle-shit’s packs woefully fall short in terms of interactive content in lieu of forcing vast quantities of sub-par decorative items saying “look at how much we’re giving you.”

But to top it all off, they are silencing those who have legitimate complaints about a lacklustre gaming experience by removing posts critical of the tactic of having TS4 shill-trolls coming into threads in the TS3 forums critical of the shining piece of snail-shit that they dare to ask for money for to instigate arguments in order to get those threads criticizing Sims 4 shut down or barring that - moving the thread to the Sims 4 thread on the pretext that “Sims 4 topics should be in the Sims 4 thread” to instigate a fight. We should be able to discuss the reasons why we dislike the other game in our own section of the forums without having shills for the other game barging in. Sims 4 fell woefully short in pleasing Sims 3 fans and the outrage at being ignored and told to go play in our sandbox if we didn’t like it; well that just cemented my resolve (at the very least) to not give EA any of my hard-earned money in terms of this pathetic excuse for a sequel.

And now, they’ve gone to the point of driving a long-time simmer off the forums by way of their censorship so that they can keep their forums a happy little echo-chamber.

Deshong04, as prickly as ever and justified in this case, practically eviscerated a Sims 4 troll who’s only reason for being in the forum was to instigate and rile up those who have a vehement and justified hatred of the way EA is shoving mediocre packs down our throats in the name of the almighty $, and promptly got censored for taking umbrage. Unfortunately I don’t have screen-caps where I growled at the troll regarding her points by which time, I had clarified my point regarding what points of the troll’s that I took exception to since she had started to address me as well. And of course my points got deleted as well by Simguru_Rtas who well promptly shut down the thread.



Oh well. I guess every section of this whole forum has to be a “Sims 4 is the best thing evar!! EA is the bestest. Everything is absolutely wonderful. The developers have our best interests at heart (and unicorns are going to fly out my ass after poking a hole in my colon).”

All I know is that if Sims 5 goes the same way as Sims 4, I’m done with EA.

What I Want to See in Sims 5

What I would love to see with Sims 5 is quite a considerable amount of change.

1. A return back to open world. The technology is there to program transitions between areas being rendered in-game whether its making cars temporarily stop at stop lights following the rules of the road while the next section loads. That kind of loading would help open world transition run smoothly. There are ways to do this without ripping players out of immersion resorting to loading screens. Find an alternative to those annoying loading screens. It’s almost 2020. Have some innovation.

2. A return of drive able cars. What’s the point of having roads without cars to drive on them.

3. CaSt I’m tired of mismatched furniture. I want to create my own style to decorate my sims’ homes.

4. CAS. If there was one thing I liked about TS4 it was the CAS interface. But I also want to see a return of sliders for fine-tuning the facial features for the finite details that you just can’t get with push-pull.

5. If you’re going to continue with the TS4 style (which I wasn’t enamoured of, I would really appreciate losing the clay “Little People” hair and making it more like the alpha hairs that some modders use.

6. I’d also prefer much more realistic trees than the “Fisher Price” trees that litter up the landscape in TS4. More higher detailed realistic trees.

7. More sports; hockey, baseball, basketball, soccer (European football), American football, maybe even rugby.

8. Maybe even consider other modes of transportation to get from world to world. Buses, airplanes, boats. And work them in as transitional screens in-game where you get a cut scene of sims frantically trying to make a flight or bus connection. Make it fun rather than watching a dam meter rolling around a plumbob.

9. Right now the Sims emotions are useless. You have a sim die; the sims are sad only for the duration of time that they’re in the room with the urn. They go out of that room and into a room with happy aura objects and they’re happy as clams again not caring that their mother, father,sister or brother may have kicked off their mortal coil. In that regards I think TS3 handled emotions better with their moodlets. After a death Sims would periodically break down in tears and left it up to the viewer to figure out what set them off. (One of my sims broke down while near a portrait of his grandmother and grandfather after their death).

10. I want to see a dynamic background that the player can interact with like Sims 3; not a painted on backdrop like TS4. With San Myshuno you got a lovely backdrop of a nice city but when you went to do anything or wanted to visit that section. Nope. Can’t do it. At least in Sims 3 you could go anywhere you wanted. My sims have explored nearly everything in Sunset Valley. I want the same functionality in Sims 5.

11. I would like to see a tool like CAW for the Sims 5. Sims 4, you are unable to develop worlds to play in or make edits to existing worlds. At least in Sims 3 when we got tired of playing in EA created worlds we could download a.user creation and go have an absolute ball in another person’s world or if we were so inclined, we could make our own. That was the flexibility of the Sims 3 that us die-hards loved. We want that ability to create our own worlds back.

12. We also want the ability for any of us to make CC not just a select few. I want the ability to create my own CC to use in my games because not many people have the same interests in CC as I do. Is someone who is interested in making clothes going to render an aircraft carrier for me to play with and place in my world? Is someone interested in cars going to want to render an F-14D Tomcat? No because they wouldn’t be interested in that sort of thing. And I’d prefer to do it myself because I have a certain standard of detail that I want my military CC to reach and its not fair to others who have no interest in the type of subjects that I want to render for my game to force them to design something that isn’t interesting to them just because I want it in my game.

13. You (EA) state that the Sims motto is “Play With Life”. But what you’ve been giving us is “Play With Life (The Way We Want You To).

I’m hoping that with Sims 5 this game can go back to being the great sandbox dollhouse game that it used to be.

Not Pulling Any Punches; EA!

On the serious side; those of you who say that cartoon graphics age better than realistic graphics. No game is going to sit on the shelf for twenty-five years. No game sits static without moving forward. That’s why we have game sequels to push the graphics envelope.

And computer systems will eventually age out of use due to obsolescence. Eventually one has to upgrade with a new system. No one remains stagnant and gets to stay in the running for consumer dollars.

I’m old enough that in my early teens, I was playing games that were just lines; squares and triangles and my imagination filled in the rest. If no one dared to push the graphics envelope we‘d still be playing games like Space Invaders.

Back during the early 80s I used to play Flight Simulator II.



Now recently I see the latest offering that Microsoft has put out. Flight Simulator 2020



I can’t play the game due to my system requirements for FS2020 being way beyond what my current system is capable of handling. Will I be able to play it some day. I hope so because I have to upgrade my computer or look at a whole new build of a gaming PC.

You cannot expect a gaming company to hold still in terms of pushing the envelope with graphics just because your system doesn’t meet the requirements.

If I want to be able to play Sims 5, DCS World; FS2020, or Cities Skylines, I’m going to have to work and make enough money to build the system I need in order to play it. I don’t have the luxury of going to Mom or Dad to ask “can you buy me a gaming system?” My Dad’s no longer here and Mom is in her 80s. Can’t ask my wife either; she’s got her hands full with having to meet our expenses as well and needing to get ahead in her career. And I have to weigh that want of having a gaming system with the other life expenses I have; food, rent, financial obligations; in other words, the necessities I need to stay alive that have to be met and say “well if I don’t have the system requirements, then I just can’t play the game” That’s life. It may not be something one wants to hear but sometimes you have to make tough decisions. It’s a tough life lesson: you can’t always get what you want to the exclusion of others You have to compromise and know that sometimes you have to wait to have something.

EA has to make money to keep its shareholders happy but it also has to balance that with what the consumers of its games want and a compromise has to be reached. Right now a segment of the fanbase feels like its been alienated and told to stifle their concerns about the direction in which the game is going in. There’s a yawning abyss of a divide between those who want more realism in the game and those that want more cartoony graphics. And EA needs to address those concerns before losing the market share of those who are unhappy because they feel as if there has been “no compromise”, just a feeling of being railroaded.

It’s Gotten Bad Enough For One of Our Simmers to Call it Quits (at buying any Sims Game past TS3)

Sims 3 is Probably the Last Sims Game For Me

Cororan has stated after seeing a poll on the Sims Forums that the majority of glitterturders want to see more cartoony Sims for Sims 5. Her reaction, like mine, was of absolute disgust.

Those who know me know that I can’t get enough of TS3

TS3 sims, I love playing with. In fact I get attached to my sims and could spend hours playing with them.

TS4 sims, I just would end up torturing (in the vein of Gray Still Plays) I have no attachment to TS4 sims. If a modder came up with a mod to inflict a “Disasters&Blessings” type torture mod; TS4 sims would meet a nasty end in every single one of my TS4 games. :evil maniacal laughter:

Nikkei sad no explodey things in TS4. Very disappointed. Nikkei stick to TS3 where lots of fun things that go boom like meteors, det packs. Nikkei very happy with TS3. Maybe sims not happy but Nikkei happy -very important to keep Nikkei happy.

On a more serious note:

I agree with @Deshong04 that Uncanny Valley is just an imaginary concept to deal with some people’s uncomfortable-ness with dealing with characters in a game or robots that are made to appear close to realistic human. Believe me, when someone gets into a FPS (first-person shooter) you’re not worrying about whether, “oh no, I’m doing something that’s horrible to another human being”. It’s a target and you aim and fire two shots center mass. Me I wouldn’t mind seeing just how far Sims 5 can push the graphics envelope.

And frankly yeah It may be disturbing to others to hear but I can make the distinction between a sim in a game and a real human being. And I won’t hesitate to inflict torturous pains on the former while respecting the rights to live of the latter.

Realistic cow-plant being nightmare fuel?

No more nightmarish than any of the spiders encountered in Dragon Age.

@Damienf519 unless you have an inside scoop as to what Will Wright intended; your “to tell you the truth” is in effect just a supposition. In fact none of us are certain as to what Will Wright would have wanted should he have continued to helm Maxis. And THAT is the truth.

The last game Will Wright had input with was Sims 2. Sims 3 was entirely EA/Maxis by which time Will Wright had left the company so TS3 was the experimental direction in which EA had wanted to go at the time - which leaned towards realism. But unfortunately EA found out that the technology at the time wasn’t up to the standard that they wanted to pursue or it would have knocked it out of the park.

Now we have technology that can push the envelope of hyper-reality. But instead of trying again to push the limits they decided to take 10 steps backwards and deliver us a game that looked like a colourist tripping on acid vomited up on a 2D cartoon along with missing key elements of gameplay and enthusing pver “how smoothly it played”. Now after multiple stuff, game and expansion packs, you’re now complaining about lag, game-breaking errors and multiple “Series of Unfortunate Events” which makes TS4 just as buggy as you continue to complain that TS3 is.

We can see exactly through other games just how good graphics and gameplay can actually combine together. Good gameplay and good graphics are not mutually exclusive terms. When I hear of people telling me that you can have good gameplay at the cost of good graphics or vice versa all I hear are EXCUSES! And a development group NOT WILLING TO PUT IN THE WORK necessary to make this a truly AAA title and THAT DISGUSTS ME.

You can see what a development group who puts everything into their work and pride of effort can come up with when you look at any shots of Flight Simulator 2020 the latest iteration in the venerable flight simulator game from Microsoft.

FS2020; a photo-realistic flight simulator modelling real world flight controls, atmospheric modelling and eye-popping 3-D terrain that has a direct effect on the flight characteristics of your aeroplane is going to be run on a 24/7 online server because due to its vast size (in the petabytes) it cannot run self-contained on a consumer PC. What we end up doing is buying access to the flight sim server to fly around a vast open world.

And unfortunately, that is the future of the Sims game as well if anyone is wanting online play. It will end up being online access to a server to run the game. And if they plan to mollify the people that they’ve alienated, EA is going to have to take a step in the other direction or this game is going to sink. And Sims will join the ever increasing list of titles on the trash-heap.

Story-time With Nikkei_Simmer

A true experience from my security career. I remember getting a 10-87 to respond to an upstairs mall bathroom where a guy was on something and was kicking the door. Like the cop who responds to break-ins in the game only it was times three; three SOs tackled the guy; got him on the ground and restrained him till law enforcement were able to respond. Turns out the cop was a friend of mine on the Mountie force. So I got the short straw to assist our friendly RCMP and escort DippiePerp to the squad car to read him his rights “you have the right to remain silent...blah blah blah.” Turns out the scrote had the presence of mind to hork a loogie at the cop who then proceeded to acquaint the dirtbag’s face with the top of the squad car (sort of a wet melon sound). It may sound like police brutality but well the guy learned a lesson, you expectorate directly at a cop; you’re going to meet the nearest flat surface at a high rate of speed. Well I got my leather pat-down gloves on (it’s supposed to protect us from sharps when we’re searching a suspect) so.my Mountie friend and I wrestle the guy into the rear seat of the red&blue, i may have used a few expletives there “get in the insert expletives (pl.) of choice car!

Well now that the perp had his misaligned braincells readjusted and is sitting in the back seat, I got to tell him, leaning in face to face: back keep in mind that I was 5-8; two-ten with muscle back then, Class 2+ ballistic vest on as well 4D Maglite attached to hip holder (mall security in Canada are not allowed to carry only the armored car guys get to) so I'm intimidating the guy who was hollering about the braincell adjustment. I tell him to shut his hole I may have used expletives here too of course I can’t exactly remember (I may have called him a dirtbag at the time or some other unflattering terms) but rest assured Master Scrote comprehended perfectly clearly; that if he’d done that to me,he'd get far worse than a face smash to the top of a squad car - oh now I remember. I think I told him that he’d be spitting out chiclets as well a copious amount of plasma platelets and whatever type he was making a Rorschach impression on the pavement (now remember there’s a cop standing right there... yes there’s such a thing as solidarity between security and law enforcement and my friend reassures me that oh, yes, he’d look the other way -Nope, didn’t see a thing...)

“oh, yes, sergeant, it appears that the suspect resisted arrest and we had to put him on the ground so that the safety of other mall-goers wasn’t jeopardized; why yes,Sergeant, that bruise? He was wriggling around while we restrained him and he scraped his face along the cement”

...and inform him that he’s banned from that mall permanently (commit violent acts while on a intoxicant and assaulting a law enforcement officer so it was justified and the supervisor had given SOs the right to ban at discretion if we observed acts that justified an immediate ban) that if he shows his face in the mall again, I will personally frog-march his rear to the mall parking lot exit, apply steel-toed boot to his posterior end and ballistically launch his posterior end into traffic on Kingsway.

So every time I see the cop jump the burglar in Sims 3 my mind goes back to my time in security and I can’t help but chuckle.

Ah then there was that time when a dirtbag was siccing his dog (a pit-bull) on other mall-goers. But that’s a story for another time. in short I wished I was in K-9 unit of our security company. Sure could have used a K-9 trained dog then.

Technobuzz Hypes Glitterturd & Ponders Sims 5

The Sims 5 News, Rumors and Release Date - more up-selling on a Sims game that seems like a bare, tattered shell of what it used to be.

Many have said that the Glitterturd has been a gigantic disappointment as it has stripped the franchise of the quirky fun and has turned it into a glitter filled extravaganza aimed towards the younger consumers. Many have complained that there is no challenge in the game anymore. Expansion packs don’t have any replay value and the game has turned from a wonderful sandbox that we had with Sims 3 to a task oriented “do a) then proceed to task b).” There is no true challenge any more in the game. Most who buy the packs usually play it one or two times then it goes on the shelf to gather dust. So what exactly are we spending our money on with the Sims 4 if we aren’t getting any replay value for dollars spent and it’s a hefty amount of dollars at 39.99 for EPs, and 19.99 for game packs and stuff packs.

With the launch fiasco in 2014 with a life stage missing right out of the starting gate and the lack of swimming pools; the Glitterturd was well on the way to shooting itself, quite remarkably, in the foot and that hasn’t stopped. Instead of one torturously long loading screen to start the game; we are bombarded by a plethora of short loading screens that make it impossible to do anything of consequence within the local neighbourhood. If you want to step off your home lot -loading screen, if you want to go to a venue -another loading screen, if you want to visit your next door neighbour - need I say it again? Yes, another damned loading screen. There is no immersion into the neighbourhood. You get a sense that the only thing interesting that happens is within your four walls of your sim’s house.

And another beef I had with the Glitterturd was the artwork that they chose to use for the game. When they turned the sims into vapid Joker-smile, cartoonish, Monty-Python-Academy-of-Silly-Walks-ish caricatures, it was pretty much a stake-through-the-heart for any interest that I would have with the Sims 4.

EA has done a lot to anger fans of the franchise who loved the previous iteration; bugs though it may have had. We could immerse ourselves with sims that reacted realistically, that behaved differently according to their traits and they grew on us as players.

The only way I can see myself even attempting to play the Glitterturd is doing things to make TS4 sims’’ lives a living hell. There is no attachment to Sims 4 sims. I don’t see any reason where I would be as immersed in the game for hours as I have been with TS3 where I look up at the clock and go “oh crap, I’ve been playing for six hours?!” TS3 has contributed to my losing track of time. I doubt that the Glitterturd will ever be able to accomplish that feat. That fact is weighed by the evidence of many players playing for only 15-25 minutes at a time and any expansion pack that has come out has been a single play-through and then consignment to the bookshelf with the rest of the single play-through expansions that have littered this particular iteration.

EA has been saying that TS4 sales have been picking up; however what they fail to tell you is that most only play a few minutes to a half-hour at a time -there is little to no replay value and that they have alienated most of the Sims fans who enjoyed Sims 3 failing to listen to those fans while targeting the younger market. It’s nota good business practice if while you’re trying to gain market share in the younger demographic; you piss off the demographic who is reaching prime earning potential and want to receive value for money. You can’t start pumping new markets in while your older demographic is hemorrhaging because they’re not having their voices heard with regards to the kind of Sims game they would like in the future.

EA has a long way to go in order to make up for alienating it’s prime money-paying demographic who have been shoved off to the side and told to “like it or lump it; be quiet while we get new customers who will buy into this Glitter-wrapped pile of crab-dung. At least maybe they’re to gullible to realize that we’re mailing the work in. Surely that won’t show in quality control.

“Bullshit”